Director: Cheh Chang
Screenplay: Cheh Chang, Ni Kuang
Starring: Alexander Fu Sheng, Chi Kuan-Chun, Bruce Tong Yim-Chaan, Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok, Richard Harrison
Year: 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976
Country: Hong Kong
BBFC Certification: 15
Duration: 459 min (total)
For years unavailable, like many of the work of Shaw Brothers Studios, the films of Chang Cheh were in their day massively popular, but while popular with fans, they became overshadowed by the work of rival studios like Golden Harvest. However, Eureka’s latest box set of Shaw properties showcases four of Cheh’s historical epics (though in one case, ‘historical’ is barely accurate).
Marco Polo (1975) stars the American Richard Harrison, who after a decade in Italian films, mainly sword and sandal, spaghetti westerns and Eurospy pictures, began his stint in Asia that would end up with him as the unwitting face of Godfrey Ho’s ninja cut and paste epics. It is a rather stiff historical epic, punctured with kung fu sequences that don’t really feel organic to the story, until one realises that despite the title, this is not the story of Marco Polo. It has barely anything to do with the true story of Marco Polo. His father and uncle, instrumental in the story do not appear. This film is also known as The Four Assassins. This isn’t a Richard Harrison vehicle. This is a vehicle for Alexander Sheng Fu, the Shaw Brothers discovery who until his death in 1983 at 28, was the nearest Shaw Brothers had to their own Bruce Lee. Harrison, as Mike Leeder admits in the excellent commentary, even noted that most of the film is him waiting around, watching other people do kung fu. But the film is an enjoyable if rather standard kung fu picture.
However, this was not Richard Harrison’s first Shaw Brothers film, which is featured on the set. Boxer Rebellion (1976) had begun production some years earlier as a two-part epic designed as the Chinese answer picture to the Western-orientated, yellowface-heavy, Spanish-made Hollywood version of the historical Chinese uprising from 1898 to 1901, 55 Days At Peking (1963). Harrison appears 90 minutes in as a German general, a sign that this film did not end up as the epic Shaw and Chang Cheh envisaged. Again a vehicle for Sheng Fu, and made like Marco Polo in Taiwan (with interiors at the Shaw complex in Hong Kong), the film is a sumptuous epic, strangled at birth, into at least in the blu-ray version, a 2 hr 17 story that still feels compromised, but not as much as the US 90 minute theatrical cut.
The other films on the set show Chang Cheh’s range. The Pirate (1975) is a Hong Kong attempt to do an Errol Flynn type swashbuckler, with Ti Lung as the early 19th century South China pirate Cheung Po Tsai. While Po Tsai has been portrayed in other films such as Project A (1983), here, Po Tsai is portrayed as a Robin Hood figure who goes undercover as a rich trader. He is pursued by David Chiang, alongside Sheng Fu, the main star featured on this set. Chiang, best known to Western audiences as the Asian lead in Hammer/Shaw’s Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974) plays a Qing dynasty military prodigy who acts as the sympathetic antagonist.
For me, the highlight of the four films in the set is The Four Riders (1972), which is a Hong Kong post-Korean War epic shot in South Korea. I was not aware of this film, and it really is something. Again starring David Chiang and Ti Lung, Japanese actor Yasuaki Kurata (briefly known as ‘Bruce Lo) and Lily Li, with Sheng Fu and future director Yuen Woo Ping in smaller roles, the film is supposedly set in the late 50s, but the location filming, haircuts, technology, cars and fashions are pure 1972. Seoul is very much fully recovered from the ruined hellscape it was in the 50s. Maybe because I am not really into historical epics, that this is why the film appealed, but I found it striking. With such setpieces as a fight in a Korean diner, the film is basically a prototype of the heroic bloodshed films that would shape Hong Kong action cinema in the 80s, while also being a blical parable, turning the story of the four horsemen of the apocalypse into a story of Korean War veterans (like M*A*S*H, it is a film where the Korean War is clearly a thinly disguised analogue for the Vietnam War, down to anachronistic details galore). A striking and ultimately bleak crime film, it is an underseen classic.
Films: 
The package of the DVDs is helped by strong commentaries with experts such as former Tai Seng Marketing video boss Frank Djeng and actor/martial artist/fan Michael Worth and British actor/casting director/writer/stuntman Mike Leeder and filmmaker Arne Venema, that are both entertaining and informative. It is a very educational and entertaining package, in all.
Disc/Package:
Horrible History: Four Historical Epics by Chang Cheh is out now on Blu-Ray in the UK, released by Eureka Classics.